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Annual fuel use for long-haul truck rest period idling is estimated at 667 million gallons in the United States. The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory's CoolCab project aims to reduce heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) loads and resulting fuel use from rest period idling by working closely with industry to design efficient long-haul truck climate control systems while maintaining occupant comfort. Enhancing the thermal performance of cab/sleepers will enable smaller, lighter, and more cost-effective idle reduction solutions. In order for candidate idle reduction technologies to be implemented at the original equipment manufacturer and fleet level, their effectiveness must be quantified. To address this need, a number of promising candidate technologies were evaluated through experimentation and modeling to determine their effectiveness in reducing rest period HVAC loads.

A measurement for a Commercial Vehicle Manufacturer was executed to compare and monitor the behaviors of a Heavy-Duty Vehicle with a real-life standard load on a private proving ground and on real road. During this measurement an event of Trailer Hoist-up was captured and recorded. Suspension springs arch open when the weight of the truck is put on them, while theoretically possible, it is improbable the springs would arch the other way around. It would require the vehicle to be suspended for a small fraction of time, which is rare on real road application because of the mass inertia of Heavy-Duty Vehicles. A Trailer Hoist-up produces an interesting particular situation for the spring. The strain distribution on the spring during the event was measured by the strain gauges mapped as a grid. The implications on the vehicle were measured by wheel force transducers, equipped with triaxial forces and triaxial moments, speed and position.

Brazil is significant grain (soy, corn, beans and rice) producer in the planet and the road transportation is needed even when rail and maritime mode is used. There are opportunities to improve the grain road transportation efficiency. This paper presents one opportunity which is the aerodynamic drag reduction and therefore the fuel and energy consumption reduction on grain road transportation. This paper will discuss some alternatives to reduce aerodynamic drag on such application considering Brazilian market regulation which has a low limit for front axle load (lower than European regulation for instance) and limit the total composition length. As an example of some alternatives to reduce drag there is the frontal area reduction and trailer to cab gap reduction. Some of those alternatives were implemented on a concept truck briefly presented on this paper, which was tested on a real application, this paper will illustrate some of those alternatives implemented.